Thursday 28th of March 2024

in defence of dawkins and harris...

harris and dawkins

The "nice" atheists are out in force trying to prove to themselves, mostly, that Dawkins and Harris are pushing the atheist barrow too much too far too fast too nasty. Some, like Jeff sparrow, even will say that:

In a different world, religion might not be necessary. But we’re not in that world yet. In the struggle for social change, the religious will play just as important role as anyone else. If you don’t believe in God, that’s great. But you’re not helping by being a jerk about it.

I'd rather be a jerk, here, in Sparrow's mind. He has not understood yet that religions are organised like armies, like governments, like companies, like the Mafia. Atheists don't even have a stall at the local school fête. 

If you think you can compete because you are nice, you are completely mistaken. You will be buried. You will be tricked.

Religions are like bulldozers. They pull the strings and feed the furnaces of politics. They may not fill the old churches anymore as they used to, but they fill the new churches to the rafters with alleluias and pop music. The other religions compete intensely with whom has the best god, or the best phone line to the god of Abraham. They will sell you paradise and bombs in the same breath, and you will find deluded solace in their crazy bosom.

Sparrow's and others' definition are wrong here. Dawkins and Harris are not jerks about the issue of religion. They see that most Atheists are comfortable in their little corner, while the rest of the planet is swamped with delusions. They see that the world could be improved with intelligence instead of going down the gurgler in fairy dust. 

Sure the pope made some noise about the state of the planet, but there is a secondary intent beyond his genuine care. Because he really cares about the planet, and most people of his conservative flock have been shocked by his warnings. But, like popes before him, he is also appropriating the scientific knowledge as part of the religious framework. This practice is designed to minimise the damage that pure scientific thought acceptance could do to the religious mumbo-jumbo. Nice package.

And please don't place the words delusion in the same relationship with atheism. In the same manner as the religious idiots want to convey the concept that atheism is a religion, they will try to tell you that atheism is a delusion. It's not. But they are very clever at manipulating your uncertainties and clever at selling you your own doubts. There is big cash for religious beliefs to keep you in the god delusion. 

So Jeff, don't try to save atheism from "new" atheism, whatever this means, because you are missing the point. Sure Dawkins appears arrogant, so convinced of his intellectual superiority... 

But then all the fucking leaders of religious beliefs — despite professing grand humility — are far more advance in their sociopathy and so fully convinced of their superiority that we accept their bullshitting as genuine. Impossible. We're conning ourselves so we appear "nice" atheists. All we do is accept our atheistic inferior imbecility in the name of a nice discussion which does not exist. It's a one way traffic. We are golden showered by the belief system. Here comes Sparrow:


We can save atheism from the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris



Jeff Sparrow

As my colleague Jason Wilson argues, denunciations of other people’s “stupidity” are a particular temptation of our age. By way of contrast, he puts the case for solidarity, writing that:


Solidarity requires listening: to stories of the structural deformation of individual lives; to the ways that popular culture makes people feel like they are living against the grain; to analyses that have not yet and may never become wholly coherent, or even depart from common sense.

That doesn’t entail abandoning a critique of religion. But it does mean adopting a certain humility when coming to terms with why ordinary people believe the things they do.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/we-can-save-atheism-from-the-new-atheists

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In another realm, that other dude, Jason Wilson, push the barrow against people who seem to be and try to be more intellectually advanced. It's like a tall poppy syndrome. You are not nice because you decry the idiocy of some dumb people who do not know better... To tell the truth it's far easier to be dumb than intelligent. Intelligence demands hard work. Being a sheep is a piece of cake. Here comes Wilson:

 

We might be better off understanding conspiracy as strategy, instead. Keane might have benefited from reading some more recent work on conspiracism. Jack Bratich shows how Cold War liberals like Hofstadter demonised conspiracy theorists in order to police the limits of dissent, and to firm up a middling consensus from the left and the right. “Conspiracy theory” is a label that dismisses non-consensual thinking in advance as stupid. It’s a way of not listening to critique that runs counter to common sense, even if it later turns out to be true.

Razer, too, displays a listening problem. She’s incisive on psychiatry’s medicalisation of everyday problems, and funny on the false promises of the New Age movement. Unlike a lot of Australian social commentary, hers is replete with memorable lines. Remarking on the music in shopping centres, she writes “It will be Coldplay, U2, Snow Patrol, REM. Mournful music played in the key of minor consumption”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/02/on-keane-and-razer-why-pointing-out-the-stupidity-of-others-is-seductive

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Rubbish...
So, you can add me to this list, Jeff. Gus is a New Atheist like Dawkins and Harris, and proud of it

Time is running out. Well not really. It's a figure of speech. Should some atheists not shock the world with a wake up call to reality, humanity is going to badly flounder in a massive vat of mediocre religious idiocy — even if people do not believe in god. 

Many forests have been saved by people sitting in trees and tying themselves to bulldozers., while scientists were pointing out the scientific value of forests to politicians who had a crooked ear and did not pay attention decidedly. This is why politicians developed laws to stop people tying themselves to trees and machinery. The politicians did not have to stop the scientists babbling on, BECAUSE MOST OF THE MMMM (mediocre mass media de mierda) PRESS/MEDIA WAS DOING IT on their behalf, against the sciences in a clever proportion. 

Look at the merde-och press. Very clever outfit that can con people with various techniques of information manipulation to suit their providers of consuming destruction.

So, Dawkins is doing some crazy things? He can explain rationally. And one can see why. One is not blind to the skits and con from the other side, even if apparently "innocent".

But the timid atheists who don't like their world being rocked and love their lattés with cream and secrecy are up in arms at Dawkins, because they are nice people and hide under a table. Yes, we are nice people but we are swamped (and going to be even more swamped according to my source philosophers) by stupid ideologies that would not get a grip on humanity should sociopathic kings and opportunistic popes/imams not develop sneaky alliances for power.

For Dawkins and Harris the time to be nice has passed. I have mentioned before, the revival of religiousness is unfortunately on the go. And why, you may ask? Because there is sociopathic power and cash in making sure people believe in religious crap. What Dawkins and Harris are trying to do is to break up this synergy. The "religious" power is massive. the more people believe crap the more the power of those who lead the crappy pack. 

Whether Dawkins and Harris are doing it right, is open to conjecture BUT THEY ARE THEY ONLY ONES at the forefront — at the "coal face" ready to blacken their hands — trying to demolish the onslaught from religious forces which are cleverly resisting and making sure they control the game.

People like Jeff Sparrow are not helping.

If you don't trash the place, women will still be victims of abuse in 100 years, on all fronts. And don't be fooled. These abuses of women are derivatives from powerful religious dictums. More kids will be educated in the lower form of information: the lies from religious sources. The preachers know how to do it. They have been doing it for more than 16th centuries since Emperor Constantine allied with Christianity so he could conquer more lands and kill more people.

It's easy to attack Keane and Razer. I do it sometimes, but for different reasons than Jeff Sparrow's mate, Jason Wilson. I do it, not because they piss on people's stupidity but because they do it with convolutions that can be confusing, in order for them to avoid the direct line to the bullshit. 

We need to distort other people's comfortable lives bathed in illusions and deceit, otherwise they will procreate with the same mindset and same result. More bullshit, more nice deviousness, more misunderstanding and NO handle on reality. 

Saving atheism from Dawkins and Harris is like declaring we're going to commit suicide because we're nice. 

We have to state with intent that we cannot stand the religious bullshit for very clear and defined reasons which other people should understand, because they can. Not pushing our atheist barrow is to believe people are more stupid than we think. They are not. They just have been brainwashed into stupidity by clever men of religious organisations. 

And if Dawkin's soap is full of grit— grit that hurts — so be it. 

Gus Leonisky
Your local window cleaner.

 

 

 

new pseudo-journalism offender...

I consider Salon to be among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism, and I have long maintained a personal boycott of the website. I ask my publishers to ignore any requests from its editors for interviews or for review copies of my books. And on the rare occasions that Salon publishes good work—the articles of Jeffrey Tayler stand out—I decline to forward the links on social media. My reason is simple: Despite the work of a few blameless writers, Salon has become a cesspool of lies and moral confusion.
http://www.samharris.org/

dawkins notes the best of the bad ideas...

Atheist author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says the best argument for God he's ever hard has to do with a deistic God as the fine-tuner of the universe.

Dawkins visited Google's office in Kirkland, Washington, to discuss his book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, after which he took a couple of readers' questions. He was asked in a video published on Monday what is the best argument in favor of God and the best argument against evolution that he has heard.

Dawkins prefaced his answer by making it clear that he is not "in any sense admitting that there is a good argument," and insisted that "there is no decent argument for the existence of deities."

He said, however, that the best argument he has heard of concerns a "deistic God, who had something to do with the fine tuning of the universe."

"It's still a very, very bad argument, but it's the best one going," he added, noting that a major problem with the argument is that it leaves unexplained where the fine tuner came from.

As for evolution, however, he said there is simply no argument at all that he can consider.

"There are reasons why people don't get it, such as the time scale involved is so huge. People find it difficult to grasp how long a time has been available for the changes that are talked about," the evolutionary biologist asserted.

Back in June 2011, Evangelical geneticist Francis Collins revealed that Dawkins had told him in a conversation the most troubling argument for nonbelievers he has heard concerns the fine-tuning of the universe.


Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/richard-dawkin

Gus: the universe is so badly fine-tuned that only existential chaos could do it so well.  

a theory about facts versus a dogma based on fiction.

Headteacher mocked on Twitter for claiming evolution is not a fact

Richard Dawkins weighs in on social media debate after Christina Wilkinson said there was ‘more evidence that Bible is true’

A primary school headteacher has been mocked on Twitter after claiming that evolution was “a theory” and there was “more evidence that the Bible is true”.

Christina Wilkinson, of St Andrew’s Church of England school in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, made the remarks in a tweet responding to London headteacher Tom Sherrington, who urged teachers to stick to science when teaching the origins of life.

Wilkinson wrote: “Evolution is not a fact. That’s why it’s called a theory! There’s more evidence that the Bible is true.”

Amid criticism and calls for her to resign on Twitter, Wilkinson issued a statement saying: “I’d like to make it clear that we teach the full national curriculum in school and that our pupils receive a fully rounded education.”

She also said her tweet was sent from a personal account and “represents my own views”. However, her Twitter handle was @WilkinsonHead, apparently referencing her role as headteacher. The tweet has since been taken down and the account closed.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/headteacher-mocked-twitter-claim-evolution-not-fact

god: the most unpleasant character in all fiction...

 

Management for the 74-year-old author of The God Delusion said he had suffered a “minor stroke” in the UK last Saturday but had already returned home from hospital.

The health scare has caused him to postpone his tour, his management said in a message passed on to ticket holders on Friday.

“On Saturday night Richard suffered a minor stroke, however he is expected in time to make a full or near full recovery,” the statement said. “He is already at home recuperating.

“This unfortunately means Richard will be unable to make his planned Australian and New Zealand tour. He is very disappointed that he is unable to do so but looks forward to renewing his plans in the not too distant future.”

By Thursday he had recovered enough to use Twitter, plugging a book called God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, for which he had written the foreword.

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/12/richard-dawkins-has-stroke-on-eve-of-australia-and-new-zealand-tour

 

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alleluia...

Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.

In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.

Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.

Early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion

Professor Tim Whitmarsh

His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.

It is a myth, he writes, which is “nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent western world consumed by capitalism.

“Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods.”

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/17/atheism-has-ancient-roots-claims-new-study

 

Alleluia... Gus has been harping on this concept for 4000 years, in various guises. Seriously, what happened is that some dickheads decided that the only way get people to behave like cannon fodder figuratively was to make them believe in a superior being , a dude in charge of having created the world to annoy the shit out of sinning humans. The amazing part is that people believed this shit. Well, repeat of the mantra and the threat of being quartered in bits helped a bit. What I have said for yonks is that atheists had to live under rocks and be quiet like church mice in order to survive in this climate of glorious religious imbecility.

The revival of atheism came with scientific development from the 16th century onwards, but it is a hard slog. eighty per cent of Swedish people do not believe in god, while in Yankeedom, ninety-five per cent of the population believe in god. This is why the candidates to the presidency are cavorting with the evangelical nutters, all of them being the biggest hypocrites on the planet.

Alleluia!... I mean Invictus!.

animal liberation...

 

Steve Stankevicius published an article on salon.com, only for the editors to distort what he said and refuse to change it. This follows a worrying trend on a site that claims to be a serious media outlet, yet refuses to abide by some very basic rules of journalism.

BACK IN January, I had a strange week. The well-known news site, salon.com published my very first popular article under a title they chose to give it: ‘New Atheists Must Become New Vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders’ rather than mine: 'Why the New-Atheists need to become the New-Vegans'. 

Until then, my words had been constrained to my practically invisible blog, but Salon gave me the chance to suddenly amplify my whispers into bellows. For that I am very grateful. Unfortunately, what was meant to be a personally joyous moment was slightly soured by some insincere behaviour.

Understandably, many people seemed to think the piece implied that being an atheist automatically compels one to be a vegan. Of course this is not true. Atheism is not a belief system and people arrive (or remain) at this worldview for a wide range of different reasons.

The title "atheist" is largely vacuous and applies little pressure on most topics outside of religion, including the ethics of meat eating. Rather, I simply argued that the moral reasoning and critical thinking championed by many famous public intellectuals – including the so-called "New Atheists" (apologies to those who don't like that name) – leads to veganism. In other words, they argue for ethics, morality, rationality, and scientific reasoning: all the necessary ingredients for a vegan mindset.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/letter-from-the-rubble-of-a-salon-article,8782

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Salon? Serious? Dear Steve... Salon has gone apeshit a long time ago... I rarely refer to it, nor do I go there. It used to have some spine until it was bought out by the MMMMMMM (Mediocre mainstream mad mass media de massive mierda). It's like the catholic church. Sciences are showing us the new reality... The catholic church tries to absorb sciences into its bosom of illogical dogma to make sure people stay on the belief treadmill. As I mentioned before this is not a new trick. Michelangelo painted pagan images on the Sistine Chapel ceiling under instruction from the pope, in order to corner the market of spirituality. Same with corporations. They buy into the sciences not for public knowledge but for profit, by making you addicted to consumption.

That Salon distorted your article is part and parcel of the "new thought police".

Meanwhile, Gus, a "new atheist", is not a "new vegan". In regard to animal protein supply, I try my best to source "organic, free range, and wild". That's me. It's not a religion nor an exclusivity — and I eat mostly ocean fish with roots, fruit, nuts and salads. I try to grow my own. I could not face a half-pound steak. I would find it gross and be sick for two days. A little kangaroo meat is okay. I am too old to go fishing myself, though I have done it in the past. Eating veges and nuts exclusively gives me stomach acidic problems. Some of our grains are not healthy. I used to make my own bread for a while. There is no sin, nor moral dilemma in this.

Steve, note that Peter Singer was on the animal liberation case many years ago (1975).

 

https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/why-the-new-atheists-should-become-the-new-vegans,8548

 

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a precious gift to the political right...

Richard Dawkins has denied using “abusive speech against Islam” after a California radio station canceled a book event with the scientist, citing his comments on Islam which the station said had “offended and hurt...many people."

Dawkins, whose bestselling study of evolution, The Selfish Gene, was named the most influential science book of all time by the Royal Society last week, was lined up to speak about his memoir A Brief Candle in the Dark at an event hosted by Berkeley’s KPFA Radio in August.

But KPFA subsequently informed ticketbuyers that the event had been canceled.

“We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam – so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech,” said KPFA in an email to ticket buyers, which Dawkins later published on his website. “While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologise for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins’s views much earlier. We also apologise to all those inconvenienced by this cancellation.”

Dawkins, the author of anti-religious polemic The God Delusion, called the decision “truly astonishing” and a “matter of personal sorrow.” He had listened to KPFA “almost every day” when he lived in Berkeley for two years, he said, and had been grateful for its “objective reporting and humane commentary.”

“My memory of KPFA is that you were unusually scrupulous about fact-checking. I especially admired your habit of always quoting sources,” he wrote to KPFA in an open letter he shared on his website. “You conspicuously did not quote a source when accusing me of ‘abusive speech’. Why didn’t you check your facts – or at least have the common courtesy to alert me – before summarily cancelling my event?”

Read more:

http://www.alternet.org/belief/richard-dawkins-event-canceled-over-his-a...

Is questioning the validity of Islam in the same spirit as questioning the validity of Christianity constitute "abuse"? No, it does not. My guess here is than many of the people objecting to Dawkins are actually evangelical Christians whose little game of lies is exposed by Dawkins. What is wrong with these people? Dawkins expressed an opinion about Islam which is by no mean "abusive":

In a report about the cancellation, KPFA said it had been contacted by activists who had described Dawkins as “a very well-known Islamophobe” who had vilified Muslims. The radio station cited tweets from Dawkins including one that read: “I think Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today” and pointed to a recent Telegraph article in which Dawkins was quoted as saying that “if you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it’s quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.”

But the station did not include the Telegraph quote in its entirety, in which Dawkins continues: “It’s terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn’t mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else.”

KPFA general manager Quincy McCoy said he decided to cancel Dawkins’s appearance when the academic’s statements were brought to his attention.

Carry on Dawkins... Gus is a fierce scientific atheist.

if you have the time...

 

I guess you have the inclination, but should you have the time:

 

 

Richard Dawkins & Lawrence Krauss Tickets | Official Ticketek ...https://premier.ticketek.com.au/shows/show.aspx?sh=DAWKINSA18

 

Richard Dawkins - & Lawrence Krauss Live - thinkinc.org.au


Adtickets.thinkinc.org.au/richarddawkins

 

 

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